Kiss Baby, Smile, Check Phone (Over and Over)

John C. Liu clutched his cellphone in both hands, tapping with his thumbs, while John A. Catsimatidis hammered out a message on his own phone.

Farther down a long table, Joseph J. Lhota shuffled two phones before him like a deck of cards. William C. Thompson Jr. squinted at the BlackBerry in his palm.

Bill de Blasio did not seem to notice their behavior — he was looking toward his knee, where one of his own phones was balanced.

New York City’s race for mayor this year has featured a number of conspicuous novelties: a white front-runner who has won considerable black support, in part by highlighting his biracial family; a contender with two beloved shelter dogs who is routinely harangued by animal rights activists; a candidate whose habit of sending sexually explicit messages to women he never met led this week to a screaming match with a heckler in a bakery.

Less conspicuous, perhaps only because voters are too busy staring at their own smartphones to notice, is the way the ubiquity of mobile devices has introduced a new peril into candidate-voter interactions: distracted campaigning.

At a forum last month, typical of the scores of such events around the city over the course of the campaign, candidates fiddled ceaselessly with their phones, though they were onstage before an audience of over 1,500 and the event was televised.

The phenomenon is in part a fact of contemporary life — people everywhere check their cellphones constantly — and in part a tacit acknowledgment of a reality of campaigning: It can be boring to listen to the same rival candidates saying the same things day after day, night after night.

“I’ve probably done about 50 of these forums,” said Peter F. Vallone Jr., a councilman from Astoria who is seeking the Democratic nomination for Queens borough president. “And when you’re finished with your answer, if you have a choice between arranging your daughter’s ride home and listening to the answer for the 20th time — I’m going to go with your daughter.”

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Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican mayoral candidate, in a campaign stop at a kosher supermarket in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in July.CreditBrian Harkin for The New York Times

A self-styled social-media savant, Mr. Vallone is inseparable from his iPhone (and his Twitter account, and his Facebook account), and he makes no apologies, saying, “If you can’t multitask, you can’t do this job.”

But Mr. Vallone ran into trouble at a forum in July, when an opposing candidate, State Senator Tony Avella, accused Mr. Vallone and others of using their phones to get answers to questions. Mr. Vallone said he was actually arranging a ride for his college-age daughter, and checking constituents’ e-mails and Facebook messages, because he was bored. Mr. Avella has since dropped out of the race.

That was not the first time such an accusation was made in Queens. Last year, before a special election for Congress, Councilwoman Elizabeth S. Crowley, a Democrat, was filmed checking her phone over 20 times during a forum. Her competitors claimed that she was being fed answers; Ms. Crowley said that she was taking notes.

The phone addiction is apparent not just during forums.

Mr. Catsimatidis, a Republican, halted in the middle of a recent stump speech, to the Caribbean American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, when his phone rang. He pulled out the phone and paused, as if searching to recognize the caller, and decided not to answer. The crowd laughed, and then he completed the point he was making, pledging to protect the city’s elderly.

On Friday, Mr. Thompson, a Democrat, was at a senior center in the Bronx, scrolling through e-mails on his cellphone as he was being introduced. Earlier in the summer, as Assemblyman Karim Camara of Brooklyn was extolling his virtues at an endorsement news conference, Mr. Thompson stood beside him checking his phone behind a manila folder.

The obsessive BlackBerry-checking of Christine C. Quinn, a Democrat who is the City Council speaker, is well known at City Hall, and Kim M. Catullo, her wife, said recently that her spouse’s BlackBerry use was her most annoying habit.

In an interview, Ms. Quinn acknowledged, “Certainly at home I’m bad.” In public, Ms. Quinn said, she tries to rein in her BlackBerry use, sometimes leaving the device behind during events. “I know if I have it,” she said, “there will be an urge to look at it.”

In an interview, Mr. de Blasio said that “from time to time, I’m checking e-mails if there is something pressing.”

“I think I’ve been exceedingly focused,” he added.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Liu, the city comptroller and a Democratic candidate, defended his behavior, saying he “communicates near-constantly with his smartphone as well as keeps track of speaking time at debates with the stopwatch function.”

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William C. Thompson Jr., a Democratic candidate, after a news conference on Tuesday at St. Albans Congregational Church in Queens. The candidates seem to check their phones obsessively.CreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times

A spokesman for Mr. Lhota, a Republican candidate, took a more defensive approach, arguing that fidgeting with phones was not the same as using them.

Mr. Weiner, whose career has twice been derailed by electronic communications, appears to have reformed his public phone behavior since an incident less than two weeks after he began his campaign, when he was spotted repeatedly scanning his BlackBerry onstage. At the forum in August at which so many of the candidates were hunched over their phones, Mr. Weiner notably leaned far back in his chair. The message seemed to be, “Look, no phone.”

As a matter of policy, the Democratic candidates are largely pro-phone. All of the party’s main contenders, including Mr. de Blasio, support lifting the ban on cellphones in public schools, and all but one, Sal F. Albanese, acknowledged having texted while driving.

As a matter of social skills, etiquette experts and campaign veterans say, looking at a smartphone while wooing a voter is ill advised.

“I don’t care if you’re bored,” said Patricia Napier-Fitzpatrick, the founder of the Etiquette School of New York. Focusing on a phone while with company, whether at the dinner table or in an auditorium, is bad manners, period, she said.

“Isn’t that the price of running for office?” Ms. Napier-Fitzpatrick said. “You have to meet people you’d rather not meet, attend events you’d rather not attend and hug lots of babies.”

George Arzt, who was an adviser to Mayor Edward I. Koch and is an experienced communications professional, said politicians today were torn because so many people — their staff, their constituents — expected instant responses to communication.

“It puts the candidates into a real quandary,” Mr. Arzt said. “On one hand, they do not want to look distracted to the audience, but on the other hand, if there are important messages coming through, you want to be sure that you answer them.”

Mr. Arzt, although he said that one quick glance at a phone might be forgivable, tends to fall back on advice he has been giving for decades: “If you are on TV, wear blue. Sit on your suit jacket. Don’t swivel in your chair. Don’t click your pen.”